The Apache Tika and Apache Pig podlings where I was mentor, have graduated a few weeks ago, both in the "galaxy" of Lucene-related projects. Congrats and good luck!

Having lots of Copious Free Time as usual (not!), I have signed up as a mentor for the new and exciting ESME project, a secure and highly scalable microsharing and micromessaging platform, written in Scala. Looking forward to seeing where this goes.

The Apache Incubator has been very busy in 2008, with many innovative things happening. It's not always easy to manage, with so many people and projects involved, but the results are very encouraging.

I wonder when the ASF will hit the 100 projects mark...probably in 2009 already, or early 2010.